Interior design for configurable spaces, including passenger vehicles, such as airplanes, buses, subway and train cars, requires adherence to numerous standards and rules. For example, in the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration imposes restrictions on commercial airliners regarding the number of doors, distance between doors and seats or other landmarks, and width of aisles. Additionally, customers or users of the passenger vehicles submit their own requirements regarding distance between seats and other landmarks, in different classes of seating. In addition to specific rules, an overriding concern of manufacturers and purchasers of passenger vehicles is often the optimization of the available interior space to fit the most possible passengers, given the constraints of government, industry, and/or customer rules.
Current interior configuration modeling systems use a manually intensive process. Systems are able to model an interior using exact coordinates of each landmark, without regard for the location of each landmark relative to the other landmarks. This manually intensive process has trouble keeping pace with the rapid change in overall aircraft configuration. For example, if a person charged with the configuration of interiors of passenger vehicles (an “interior configurator”) adds a landmark to the configuration, current interior configuration models are unable to shift seats or other landmarks in an efficient way, while also taking into account the constraints of rules imposed by governments, industry standards, and/or customers. Thus, the configurator would have to manually adjust the configuration of the interior to meet rules and standards.
Also, current interior configuration models do not automatically insure optimal seat and landmark locations, allowing for the largest number of seats possible under current constraints. Decisions made using current configuration models are based on limited arrangement data requiring an educated guess as to whether a configuration is optimized. Because the current tools require manual entry of coordinate data for landmarks and seats, the current tool requires constant regular use and a high level of expertise in order to be proficient at configuring and designing interiors. Finally, current tools allow for only manual extraction of internal configuration data, which is of limited utility for downstream processes such as assembly or maintenance.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an interior development system for environments such as passenger vehicles that automatically morphs interiors to accommodate changes such as for example new lofts, door locations, and other feature changes. It would be further desirable to use a knowledge-based approach to automate the interior development process. Also, it would be desirable to store configuration data in a manner so that it is accessible to downstream users.